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By Grey Gartin
Cronkite News

MILWAUKEE – The year Donald Trump won the presidency, the Republican platform declared that “traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society.”

The party reaffirmed the 2016 platform four years later during the pandemic.

The newest version, crafted by Trump loyalists, scrubs such phrases – striking a more inclusive tone on contentious social issues as the focus shifts to the general election.

In place of language condemning same-sex marriage, the 2024 platform promises that “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents.”

“Donald Trump doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight, Black, brown or white, or what gender you are,” Richard Grenell, who served as the nation’s spy chief under Trump, told the convention Wednesday night. “He knows that we are all Americans, and that it’s time to put America first.”

Grenell, who is openly gay, served as ambassador to Germany and ​​acting director of national intelligence under Trump – a groundbreaking appointment to oversee the CIA and other agencies that would have shut him out in earlier generations.

Braden Lopez-Biggs, Arizona chair of Log Cabin Republicans – which brands itself as representing LGBT activists and their allies – said the new wording around marriage is an important effort to attract non-Republican voters.

“Within the Republican Party, we don’t want the government in our lives,” Lopez-Biggs said. “We don’t want the government in our homes, and we don’t want the government in our bedrooms.”

Log Cabin Republicans is pushing for a “more inclusive” GOP.

At a “Big Tent Event” Wednesday, LCR members and supporters celebrated the elimination of language from the platform that rejects same-sex marriage.

“The fight for equality in America is largely over,” Grenell said at the event.

Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., railed against “the radical gay left” and the notion that LGBTQ+ voters are automatically Democrats.

The 2016 Republican platform – which remained unchanged for 2020 – condemned the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision from 2015, which required states to recognize same-sex marriage performed in any other state.

Lopez-Biggs called that ruling a “linchpin” – a long-sought goal that allowed moderate LGBTQ+ voters to shift attention toward dinner table fiscal issues and gravitate to the GOP.

Stances that are mainstream among GOP activists can be politically costly in battleground states. Independents are far more supportive of same-sex marriage than Republicans, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study.

The 2016 platform opposed public subsidies for abortion and called for regulations intended to curb access.

In 2022, the Supreme Court struck down federal legal protection for abortion, sending the issue to the states and changing the political playing field. The 2024 platform narrows the focus to opposition to “late-term abortion” while celebrating the long-sought victory in the courts.

According to Gallup Poll data, 74% of independent voters think same-sex couples should be “recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages,” compared to 46% of Republicans.

“People have come out to recognize that if you want to reach suburban women, if you want to reach young people, you have to understand that they just want to know that their conservative leader doesn’t hate people,” Grenell said at the LCR event.

Lisa Malachowsky, co-chair of the Maricopa County Democratic Party’s LGBTQ+ Committee, said Log Cabin Republicans and anyone else who supports LGBTQ+ rights is “misinformed” if they think they have a home in the GOP, regardless of what the new platform says.

She pointed to Project 2025 – a blueprint for a second Trump term crafted by some of his top advisers and the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The lengthy document calls for Congress to confer legal protection on adoption agencies that turn away same-sex couples on religious or moral grounds. It calls for assurances that grants intended to strengthen families would still be available to faith-based groups that refuse to recognize same-sex marriage.

And it asserts that “children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage” often fare worse, and that “the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages.”

The Trump campaign has not rejected the substance of Project 2025 plans but has downplayed its significance, asserting that think tanks don’t speak for Trump.

“They’re just moving the full description of what their intent is from the platform to this Project 2025 document,” Malachowsky said.

Delegates formally adopted the new party platform on Monday.

“I realized Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re Black, white, gay or straight,” Amber Rose, a reality TV star and internet celebrity who is openly bisexual, told the convention. “It’s all love.”

A handful of delegates jumped out of their seats, clapping with excitement at the shoutout to the LGBTQ+ community.

Other speakers earlier that evening had railed against transgender individuals and “men in women’s sports.”

State Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, an at-large delegate, said changes to the platform on same-sex marriage and abortion could help in the fall, “in the sense of it’s a reason not to vote against us, perhaps.”

He would have preferred to see the new platform call for the Obergefell ruling to be overturned as legally flawed, though he foresees a backlash if that happened: “You’d probably get gay marriage legalized in most states.”

Lopez-Biggs said he plans to lobby Arizona GOP Chair Gina Swoboda to change the state party’s platform to bring it in line with the national platform’s language on marriage. She’s expected to attend an LCR Phoenix quarterly meeting next month, he said.

Joe Arpaio, 92, the former tough-on-immigrants Maricopa County sheriff who is running for Fountain Hills mayor after a failed bid in 2022, attended the convention as a guest.

He said “it’s tough running sometimes” in Arizona because the electorate is split nearly evenly among Republicans, Democrats and independent or unaffiliated voters. That makes the softer language welcome, he said.

“Bring in everybody,” Arpaio said.

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.